Thank you all for the warm response to my previous post - When I read those comments some of them felt like gentle pats on the shoulder, warm palm squeezes and hugs. This spontaneous and unselfish display affection in the blogosphere never ceases to amaze me. Reminds me of the words on a poster I saw somewhere -'There are no strangers in this world - only friends we haven't met yet.' I am fine thank you. The tone of the post may have been a bit misleading - a bit of a head fake.

Head fake? I just learnt this term and am showing off actually. Apparently this technique is used in basketball where the player looks in one direction while actually moving in another with the intention to mislead the opponent. I recently read Randy Pausch's book "The Last Lecture" where he talks about this technique:

When we send our kids to play organized sports -football, soccer, swimming, whatever - for most of us, it's not because we're desperate for them to learn the intricacies of the sport.What we really want them to learn is far more important: teamwork, perseverance, sportsmanship, the value of hard work, an ability to deal with adversity. This kind of indirect learning is what some of us like to call a 'head fake."There are two kinds of head fakes. The first is literal. On a football field, a player will move his head one way so you'll think he's going in that direction. Then he goes in the opposite way. it's like a magician using misdirection. Coach graham used to tell us to watch a player's waist. "Where his belly button goes, his body goes," he'd say.The second kind of head fake is the really important one - the one that teaches people things they don't realize they're learning until well into the process. if you're a head fake specialist, your hidden objective is to get them to learn something you want them to learn.

Pausch who was a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in September 2006 and all treatment failed to arrest its spread and in August 2007 he had been given nothing more than 3 to 6 months good health. At 45, married for just 8 years and with three children 5, 3 and 1, Pausch decided to make the most of what was left of his life by living everyday to the fullest possible extent. Accepting the fact that his children would have to grow up without a father he decided build some wonderful memories with them in the short time left which would help them remember their father later in their life. And yet he agreed to devote a lot of his precious time to do a lecture for the students at the university. In reality he intended the whole lecture titled 'Achieving your childhood dreams' to be his talk for his children containing all the wisdom that he wanted them to have from their father's life and beliefs. That was the head fake.

On September 18, 2007 Randy Pausch delivered his last lecture at Carnegie Mellon. His book 'The last lecture' was published in April 2008. Randy Pausch died on July 25th, 2008. The book is a simple narration of the high and low points of his life and a tribute to people who influenced the course of his life. The mood is so positive at all times that it is easy to forget that the speaker has a few days left to live. Another of his famous head fake techniques perhaps.

P.s: So what was the head fake in my post? I had seen some mother-in-law bashing around the blogosphere and I thought I might get people to see things from a new M-I-L's perspective. Just hoping that would let them view their own a little more charitably.